Tennessee State University is a historically Black university with a high minority enrollment, better than 80% minority undergraduate students and 57% minority graduate students. As a result, the University has a goal/ responsibility to address underrepresentation of these students in all academic career areas. The overall goal of the TSU SCORE program is to assist the University in addressing underrepresentation of minority students in biomedical research through support of ongoing research by faculty in the Departments of Biology and Chemistry. The specific aims of the proposed continuing TSU SCORE program are to: (1) increase the number of funded faculty biomedical research projects via the SCORE program from the current 2 to 8 faculty;(2) increase the research competitiveness of 8 faculty members such that within an 8-year period, they will be able to gain competitive extramural support of their ongoing research programs;and (3) increase the average annual number of peer-reviewed publications per investigator. Two research subprojects in this application represent the Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry, which are housed in the College of Arts and Sciences of the University. Research topics include retinoic acid receptors in neurogenesis in the post-natal olfactory epithelium and inhibition of human natural killer cells by butyltins.